German Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Nicholas Boyle

Despite its brevity, this Very Short Introduction presents a coherent
thesis, placing German literature in an ongoing conflict between the
two wings of the middle class, between the bourgeoisie and officialdom.

"German literature of the 18th century emerged not from the
imitation of works of the English empiricist Enlightenment nor
from Gottsched's Leibniz-Wolffian and France-oriented rationalism
but from the conflict of the two, a conflict which mirrored the
diverging interests of the official and the bourgeois wings of
the German middle class, and which intensified as the century
wore on."

This is clearly an over-simplification, but it provides a framework around
which newcomers can organise what would otherwise be a mass of details.
It also helps avoid the banality which a more encyclopedic survey of
this length would have risked.

The bulk of the Very Short Introduction consists of long, "German style"
single paragraphs, covering a subject rather than a single idea. These
are typically around a page or even a bit longer, and focus on individual
writers or poets, often on a single key work, or on broader themes.

The coverage is dominated by "the two distinctively modern literary
genres", subjective lyrical poetry and the objective realist novel, but
it extends to other literary genres and even to inextricably interwoven
aspects of philosophy and history: Strauss' Life of Jesus, Wagner's
operas, and so forth. Boyle's evaluations sometimes seem to mix political
judgements with literary ones, which can be jarring.

Boyle omits any treatment of the medieval period or Swiss and
Austrian/Hapsburg literature — so there's nothing on Kafka or Rilke,
or on Dürrenmatt or Frisch — leaving those to three additional chapters
available on the Web. Even with that reduction in scope, many important
themes and writers are necessarily omitted.

A Very Short Introduction is not terribly useful as a reference,
obviously, but it's good fun to read and should work to provoke
an interest in its subject; there are two pages of further reading
suggestions for those who want more.